Thoughts on My Own Private Idaho

   On Criterion, I rewatched Gus van Sant’s 1991 film My Own Private Idaho, a film that is both a classic of 1990s independent film and queer cinema. It’s really well-known, so I don’t have to go too much into a plot summary, but River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves play Mike and Scott, hustlers and sex workers who live on the streets, both queer but only Mike being able to admit it, while Scott sees himself as “gay for pay” (a term for seemingly straight men who do gay sex work), and living in Seattle and Portland and traveling around, getting by on sex work, drug use, and hanging around other street characters.

    The movie is based on both John Rechy’s 1963 novel City of Night, featured street hustlers who did not admit to being gay, and a modern interpretation of William Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V, which is clearer in the scenes between Keanu Reeves as Scott and the late William Richert as Bob the Pigeon, a middle-aged mentor to a gang of street kids and hustlers who live in an abandoned apartment building. They exchange theatrical monologues that feel very Shakespearean, and it’s a fun and unique touch to the movie to blend it with the modern day issues of homelessness and drug addiction and poverty.

    I hadn’t seen this movie in many years, and had only vaguely remembered it, so it was really nice to rewatch it. Phoenix and Reeves were excellent in this film, with a natural chemistry and ease, and I liked the layers of their relationship, how Sean came from a rich family with his father being the mayor, waiting for a big inheritance so he could leave the streets, while Mike came from a unstable poor background without knowing who his father was or where his mother’s whereabouts are. Mike also has narcolepsy, randomly passing out and having romanticized visions of his long-lost mother.

    This scene is of Mike waking up in a rich neighborhood from his narcolepsy, after Scott and another hustler removed him from a client’s (Grace Zabriskie) home, and he is approached by Hans (Udo Kier), a German man looking to give him a ride to town, with Mike being skeptical of his ulterior motives.

    It’s a really stunning, sad, and beautiful film, and I’m glad I revisited it.